Prepare your organization to manage the risks brought on by multiple clouds.

The cloud has evolved from being a novelty to an essential backbone of today’s digital economy for businesses around the world. The seismic shift in business models has made companies appreciate the flexibility, stability, security, cost reduction and efficiency of operations offered by the cloud. All of these factors make cloud adoption a critical part of an organization’s digital transformation journey.

Increased hybrid multicloud deployments are also leading to an expansion in global attack surfaces. This increases the need for robust, all-encompassing security, compliance and risk management solutions from cloud service providers. Is your organization ready to manage the risks brought on by multiple clouds?

The real cost of data breaches and non-compliance

Data breaches are becoming more prevalent and getting more expensive and impactful than ever. As companies experience more breaches and costs continue to climb, they are looking to better manage this risk and limit potential losses.

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, the global average data breach cost has now hit $4.35M — an all-time high that is up 13% compared to the same period two years ago. 83% of organizations studied experienced more than one data breach and quoted a lack of awareness of their cloud environments as the primary reason for this risk.

Regulatory non-compliance alone can cost a business three times the cost of maintaining or implementing compliance monitoring solutions. Non-compliance with GDPR EU can cost a company up to 4% of its worldwide annual revenue for the preceding financial year or €20 million ($23 million) — whichever is greater.

Considering the breach and remediation costs, reputational damage, business downtime and legal and regulatory compliance fines, the costs can be high.

Challenges

Cloud security and compliance risks increase challenges in executing digital transformation strategies. Top challenges include the following:

1. Restricted visibility across the hybrid multicloud deployments: The absence of continuous full-stack visibility into your hybrid multicloud environment creates blind spots across security and compliance postures at infrastructure, platform and application levels, which leads to knowledge gaps.
2. Instability caused by unintegrated point solutions: Separate tools cannot provide the 360° view necessary to accurately assess security posture at an enterprise-wide level. This aggravates blind spots and can lead to errors.
3. Addressing local and global regulations: Governing the transformation in the changing regulatory and industry compliance landscape.
4. Automating security and compliance posture assessments and remediation efforts: Lack of ‘insights’ leads to a lack of prioritization of mitigation efforts from pre-deployment to post-deployment.
5. Changing risk profile management: Automating cloud risk assessment caused by the changes in the cloud asset configurations and their impact on the overall risks.

Despite being aware of these challenges, 22% of the enterprises assess their cloud security posture manually. Only one in five organizations assess their overall cloud security posture in real-time. Threat actors are constantly targeting vulnerable cloud environments. To safeguard their businesses, enterprises need to stay a step ahead with continuous assessment and monitoring of their security and compliance postures in real-time.

Considering these challenges, an integrated approach to security, compliance and governance of the full cloud stack is needed from a cloud service provider partner.

Reducing security and compliance risks with IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud for Financial Services and regulated workloads with Caveonix provide a robust set of capabilities to secure data center infrastructure with strict security, compliance and governance controls of the highest standards. This, coupled with the continuous monitoring and reporting from development to deployment, ensures that the customer applications are always protected and meet all the compliance challenges in the global regulatory environment:

IBM Cloud addresses the challenges of the overall digital risk management by providing the following:

1. Complete visibility: A unified dashboard prevents blind spots and any digital risk involved with cloud data migration and customer data protection. Supporting security assessments based on hardening guides and best practice recommendations using benchmarks like CIS give you an in-depth view of the security and compliance postures.
2. Integrated approach: Customers have 360° visibility of their data assets and can manage the security and compliance posture from a single integrated dashboard, reducing overall risk.
3. Localized and compliant cloud infrastructure: Caveonix Cloud supports over 38+ regulations that meet the state, national and global regulatory compliance requirements (such as GDPR, BSI C5, PCI and HIPAA), creating differentiated service offerings across industry verticals like finance, healthcare, public sector, utilities and others. Localized deployment in the hybrid multicloud environment monitors and enforces segmentation based on compliance zones and regulatory boundaries, ensuring that all stakeholders, service providers and their customers have full access to this information.
4. Security compliance monitoring: Assessing the drift in inventory of security and compliance posture across on-prem and external data centers based on automation is key for continuous monitoring. Caveonix for IBM Cloud monitors shifts in highly dynamic cloud environments on an ongoing basis to detect and remediate risk and keep pace with transformation.
5. Overall risk assessment: Caveonix Cloud’s quantitative risk analytics with trending recommendations for prioritization identify the top 20% of security or compliance mitigations that should be prioritized to create an 80% impact for improving the overall risk posture and reducing overall risk.

Learn more

Cloud adoption can be made less risky by choosing the right service provider partner that understands your business goals and seamlessly integrates security and compliance into your cloud adoption strategy. This will enable rapid innovation in executing enterprise digital transformation strategy governed by core security principles that reduce the overall risk and meet the local to global regulatory compliance requirements.

“This article appeared in IBM Cloud Blog and has been published here with permission.”